Quality Sells

Abstract

With the emergence of an international bestseller culture in the first half of the twentieth century, foreign literary works were of increasing importance in domestic conceptions of cultural hierarchies. This was in particular the case in peripheral literary systems, which largely depended on translations of foreign novels to meet the growing demands for literary works in this period. Using the international bestsellers Gone with the Wind (1936) by the American author Margaret Mitchell and Katrina (1936) by the Finnish author Sally Salminen as case studies, this article aims to investigate how such works were adapted, marketed and evaluated in the peripheral Dutch literary field of the late thirties. Analyzing publishers’ production and marketing strategies on the one hand and the evaluating practices of literary reviewers on the other, an overview is presented of the ways in which different aspects of this upcoming international bestseller culture influenced the Dutch literary field, focusing in particular on the incorporation of these international bestsellers into local debates. The concept of middlebrow is used within the framework of Bourdieu’s field theory to study mechanisms of cultural distinction and the attribution of symbolic capital to these foreign works in the context of a national literary field.